The Government survey is thought to give a truer picture than police figures as it is based on quizzing victims, many of whom do not report crimes.

And it suggests five in six knife offences do not show up in police forces statistics, The Mirror reported.

Yet the real scale of the epidemic is feared to be far worse as Thursdays report ignores under-16s and does not cover Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It was released alongside separate police figures for England and Wales that for the first time included a category on blade crimes.

Officers recorded 22,151 crimes, a tally that is one-sixth that of the Crime Survey and does not even include murders.

Police have said that the five million total recorded crimes are down by nine per cent in a year.

But opposition politicians ridiculed the claim and demanded officers be freed from red tape and allowed to patrol streets.

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: The scale of knife crime is a shocking indictment of Labours failure. Police have been tied up in so much red tape that they can only spend 14 per cent of their time on the beat.